Update on the Honeybees

The warming temperatures and blooming flowers all about have really gotten the bees working, well, as busy as a bee.  I let our cilantro go to flower in the garden because the bees really love it.  They are all over the cilantro flowers in the garden.

I don't know where this girl had been prior to stopping over in the cilantro patch, but take a look at her "pollen sac" on her legs.  They are filled with a reddish-purple pollen.  I don't know where that came from, but she's taking that back to the hive, but not before she collects some nectar or pollen from the cilantro.

The colony of bees that have resided in the column on our side porch left last week.  We think they swarmed.  We were very fortunate to have caught TWO swarms in the yard last week.  More on that in a moment.  In a swarm, the old queen generally leaves with half the bees.  The weird thing about that is that there was NO activity in or out of the column for several days.  Then all of a sudden... BOOM!  Bees repopulated the column!

For the two swarms we caught, we went to check on them the other day.  Here's Tricia in her bee suit about to open one of the boxes for inspection.  

The swarm is not a huge one, but they fill two or three frames and were buzzing away, very busy.

In my swarm trap, which is merely a deep box with 5 frames of old comb and foundation, the bees were already drawing out comb - not where I wanted it.  Time to get the remaining 5 frames in the box.  When bees swarm, they carry honey, wax, pollen, everything they need and when they find a new home, they get right to work.

If you look to the right center of the photo below, you can see that the queen has been busy.  Can you see the bee larva?  It is the little white worm looking thing curled up like the letter "c" in the cells.

Here's a photo of some younger larva in some fresh comb.

If there's larva, there's got to be a laying queen, and THERE she is!  Can you see her?  She's in the center left of the photo below with the long yellow tail.

So we have eggs and larva in both of the swarms we caught last week.  We have capped brood in two of our remaining four boxes of bees.  We're still waiting for a queen in both of the boxes that we split.  When we opened one of them, we did see two queen cells.  We'll check back in on them on Sunday and see if the splits were successful.